I read a lot of non-fiction books and as a result, I notice that 27.8% of psychology books feel compelled to mention the Solomon Asch studies on conformity, the Stanley Milgram shock experiments on obedience, and Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment on intergroup conflict and cooperation. I’m not gonna lie, I shake my head and skip these pages.
There are hundreds of thousands of social science studies. And yet, everyone seems to converge on the same ones, especially when someone gets social media traction. Like this one, with the really sexy data visualization of how personality is related to life satisfaction:
Across three countries (Estonian, Russian, English) personality pooled together predicted life satisfaction almost perfectly with correlations between .80 to .90. Personality more or less is your happiness set point, stable across a decade, with emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness doing the heavy lifting (LINK).
Then there was this one, showing that the line running from lifetime adversity to mental health is not a downhill ski slope. It is a U.
People who had been through some serious things, injuries divorces and losses, came out with lower distress, fewer post-traumatic symptoms, and higher life satisfaction than people buried in adversity, and better off than people who had sailed through with almost none (LINK).
The sweet spot for having a great life despite adversity sits somewhere around five major negative events, give or take.
Think about this in workout terms. Never train and you are never sore, and you also never get stronger. Never get stressed and you never build the regulatory skills to manage stress when it shows up (and it will). Even something as ordinary as a speech lays down a little toughness.
These are great studies, all of them. If this is your first exposure to them, fantastic, this means you life a life offline and I hope you enjoy them. But there is so much great science. And there is one study in particular that has not been discussed by a single soul I know online or offline. It is a massive study of over 30,000 people over two decades. It is an absolutely essential piece of work for anyone who wants to understand emotions, teaches on emotions, or facilitates workshops on emotions…
